Our state parks, neglected for decades, need support from government, citizens

Nov. 23, 2007

Written by

Arthur H. Gunther

On the Web

- Learn more about New York's parks; visit the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation Web site, www.nysparks.state.ny.us- Discuss the state park system and other natural wonders; visit "The Nature of Things," a blog about nature and the environment, on LoHud.com/blogs.

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Once upon a time, the visionary wealthy, like the Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Harrimans and others, rescued some of their cash from the income tax man and did a mitzvah for the proletariat, helping establish vast state park holdings in both New York and New Jersey. A bit more than 100 years later, their good-natured investment has long been neglected, even devalued, by government inaction, indifference and incompetence.

That Carol Ash, once commissioner of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission and now New York's parks chief, is asking Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the Legislature to support increased funding - up to $650 million - so "critical" infrastructure improvements can be made speaks strongly of government ineptness going back at least four decades.

Albany and Trenton last looked seriously at the bi-state parks in 1960 or so, and what they saw were well-visited, well-staffed, well-maintained facilities stretched over almost 90,000 acres that were fulfilling the mission of the PIPC - to provide seasonal escape for the urban millions. Indeed, the Palisades Interstate Parkway, originally conceived as a "linear park" to Bear Mountain, was planned in the 1930s as a direct and quick motor route from Fort Lee opposite Washington Heights.

The parkway had to wait until the Great Depression and World War II ended, and when it finally opened in the 1950s, the PIP system was already in its heyday, visited via cars, buses and excursion boats on the Hudson River.

From the 1960s on, things began to deteriorate. At a time when attendance was changing from mostly urbanites to a mix including former New York City residents who had moved to the suburbs, the huge infrastructure of roads, buildings, pool and lake pumping systems, the famed Bear Mountain Inn, its zoo and skating rink, ski areas, trails such as that at Hook Mountain, electrical, plumbing and sewage systems, bridges and dams all began to show age and the effects of decades of use.

It was then that Albany and Trenton should have provided major funding and inflation-proof budgets for each year onward. But money went elsewhere - for colleges in both states, superhighways, schools, local communities. The PIPC system and other parks in each state became poor and forgotten relatives, further victimized by the inflation and recessions of the late 1960s and 1970s. Budgets did not keep pace, to the point now where, as Ash notes, the present $40 million capital spending plan for the entire New York state system, adjusted for inflation, provides 50 percent less than it did in 1992.

In the later 1970s, even the Palisades Interstate Parkway, half of which today has the same pavement as when it was built 50 years ago, was severely hit when maintenance was taken from its own staff and given to an overworked, under-budgeted state Department of Transportation. The funding instead went to help alleviate New York City's fiscal crisis. Weeds have thrived along the parkway right-of-way ever since.

Today, a walk through any of the parks reveals lack of maintenance, decaying, once-beautiful buildings built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and master Old World craftsmen in the 1930s, and overall disrespect for the great gifts bestowed on the people more than a century ago. Lacking, too, are interactive educational and information systems required for the modern age.

When I was Editorial Page editor of The Journal News in Rockland, the Editorial Board long and often urged and supported PIPC Commissioners Nash Castro, Robert Binneweis and Carol Ash to fight for park rehabilitation. Albany and Trenton ignored the pleas.

Now Ash, in a stronger position, may get Spitzer to look seriously at her review of PIPC and all state parks, one that identifies more than 750 "urgent critical" capital projects that will cost $600 million to $650 million to complete.

About 60 million visitors come to the parks annually, and the long, long road to recovery must begin now. Spitzer and the Legislature must provide rehab funds, a much more realistic, inflation-proof budget, and the governor must urge New Jersey to do its share for the PIPC parks in the Garden State system.

New endowments must be gathered from the wealthy, just as their predecessors provided initially.

Perhaps the state could set up Civilian Conservation Corps-like job programs involving troubled and/or unemployed youth who could tackle some of the needed rehabilitation and upkeep efforts.

Organizations such as Parks and Trails New York, a citizens' group, must grow in number and influence. (For example, about a year ago, Parks and Trails issued a vital and welcome report on the state of New York's parks, highlighting some of the problems that Ash has recently focused on.)

Our parks, so many of which are in this area, are the key to tourism, to a better quality of life, to protection of open space and the ecology. They are, most of all, a legacy never intended to be so woefully neglected.

The writer, retired, is the former editor of the Editorial Page, The Journal News in Rockland.